We adopted a freezer when my mother-in-law sold her house, but the nice moving men discombobulated our manual thermostat in the process of moving said freezer into our home.

I took the opportunity to buy a programmable digital thermostat.

The cable coming out of the wall behind the thermostat was literally plastered in place. When I test-mounted the new box, the wire leads were too short to make connections inside it.

I went to Reno Depot and bought a meter of wire. I stripped the insulation off the main cable and liberated lengths of smaller coloured wire. I’d also bought some heat-shrink insulation and a heat gun.

I soldered the wires together and protected the joints with the heat-shrink wrapping. Here’s a photo (I’d put it in the blog were Blogger behaving).

I’m quite proud of my work.It’s not easy to solder loose wires above eye level. The new thermostat is working like a charm.

By the way, you can’t use a heat gun to caramelize the sugar on top of creme brulee. The thing puts out sufficient heat, but it blows the sugar all over the kitchen.

Bonus call to arms:

I’ve been hearing scritching noises in my office area – it’s a subdued sound, like the sound the scroll wheel of a mouse makes. I suspect the culprit is a mouse of the organic variety. Traps go down tonight.